> Knuth (author of TeX) apparently had three PhD students doing work in > hyphenation algorithms alone. This is how complex the field is. I've > not been able to verify this story. :)
knuth's algorithms to set word-spacing across a paragraph is mind-blowing. he moved into a highly specialised field in typography, called 'micro-typography'. to his credit, *all* dtp and typesetting tools in the digital domain are inspired by TeX. > > In general, page composition done by today's computer-literate crowd is of > very poor quality. Someone once said that modern WYSIWYG layout tools help > you "not to follow rules of good typesetting, but to break them." Even > among TeX users, I find a lot of blind following of defaults. For > instance, people just use Computer Modern, totally unaware of gems like > Imprint, Garamond, or Baskerville. argh! i find that even garamond, baskerville, imprint, are overused and abused, especially by indian designers. for the information of others, there are more than 6,500 'popular' fonts, all professional quality meant for professional typesetting. it is a shame that computer OSes ship with a mere handful, and tend to do 'defaults'. meanwhile, the birth of truetype has led to several problems, distortions, and all this compounded by the availability of several thousand gimmicky and amateurish fonts that dot the digital domain. 'experts' tend to state that truetype fonts are of superior quality than postscript fonts, but their statement is not based on facts. on many occassions i have pointed out how truetype fonts are actually of lower-quality than postscript, and it has to do with the maths behind the forms. > This leads to typesetting and font > selection which does not reflect the material's content. Of course, > in the Windows world, the "Times New Roman" and the "Arial" and the > default styles are so depressing that the less said, the better. even more depressing is the birth of the www. web pages and web-typesetting, is the ugliest, worst incarnation of a typesetting style. its use of underline, lousy letter and word spacing, incorrect handling of tables, font-rendering, etc is pathetic. every aspect of web-based typesetting is in contrast to hundreds of years of typography. it is thoroughly disgusting. > > If you can find any online resources, please let me know. for the truly intrepid, may i recommend delving into the mirror discipline of calligraphy. the web has some superb references on calligraphy. :-) LL _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
